Live Radio Broadcasts from the 1940's by a young 30-year-old legendary virtuoso of the keyboard, Earl Wild. Radio Broadcasts from NBC and ABC in New York City of rare Earl Wild performances of Scarlatti, Daquin, Mussorgsky, MacDowell, Mendelssohn, Rachmaninoff, Chopin and an absolutely staggering Liszt Piano Sonata. Not to be missed by anyone.

Disc.Reviews

Ivory Classics, which often serves as a venue for the inscribed legacy of American piano virtuoso Earl Wild (b. 1915), has issued a disc devoted to performances given for radio broadcasts during the 1940s. After WJZ officially became WABC, Wild came under contract in 1946 for The Piano Playhouse to be aired on Sundays. Most of the opening pieces derive from NBC broadcasts Wild made while in New York City earlier in the decade. Several of the 16"acetates on which the programs were recorded have been rescued from deterioration. The Liszt Sonata in this collection, for instance, derives from one of the broadcasts from 1949. The remastering, by Ed Thompson, is quiet, but the acoustic is often dry and dead in spots, and the piano sound occasionally tinny. Still, the Wild magic shines forth in the brilliant filigree, say, in MacDowell and Mendelssohn, in the pearly play of the Rachmaninov G Major Prelude, and the brittle salon style of Moussorgsky's Children's Piece, with its look ahead to Balakirev's Islamey. The Liszt B Minor Sonata is Wild's signature piece: in spite of some gritty crackle in the sound, the feast-at-one gulp approach is both volatile and poetic at once. Like Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy, the single-movement piece seems to fall into a series of marked episodes which Wild is careful to shape with architectural and harmonic care. The quality of the sound, however, may prevent audiophiles and all but the most ardent Earl Wild devotees from entering a well-trodden realm where more acoustically gratifying inscriptions lie. The Chopin Polonaise has suave articulation without jingoistic pomposity. Very sober and effective playing throughout by an American virtuoso whose career and repertory by the 1940s could have easily been likened to that of Claudio Arrau.